This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Sometimes the gentle, unearthly glow of sheer genius illuminated this wondrous play and parts of it became clear to me for the first time.

But then there were also passages where the candles sputtered and grew dim, leaving us literally and figuratively in the dark.

Abraham’s Crow’s Theatre take on this masterpiece is brave and commendable without being foolish. An all-Canadian cast acquit themselves nobly (with a few exceptions) and the director’s staging is inventive throughout, but never stoops to egregious gimmicks.

The story of theatrical grande dame Arkadina, her playwright son Konstantin, the would-be actress Nina, and all the others in this dysfunctional nuclear family is a harsh one, made up of betrayals and heartbreak and ultimate death.

But it’s also bleakly, blackly funny at the same time, in a way that would come to be known as Chekhovian.

When Abraham and his cast are juggling these two worlds with finesse, all is well and one only has to see a performance like Gregory Prest’s clueless yet heartbreaking Medvedenko to understand how it should work. This actor can make us laugh one moment and cry the next, in a totally seamless manner.

On the other hand, his eventual wife, Masha (played by Bahia Watson), and her meddling mother (Tara Nicodemo) offer object lessons in how not to pursue the text, as they offer us broadly comic mugging, alternating with seemingly unmotivated bursts of violent emotion.

A trio of superlative older actors put us firmly back on track again, with Tom Rooney’s sublimely understated philanderer, Trigorin, Eric Peterson’s agonizingly unfulfilled bureaucrat, Sorin, and –best of all – Tom McCamus’s sandpaper-dry doctor, Dorn, all demonstrating the way to deliver the dramatic goods.

It’s the play’s three leading roles that can be problematic, although each of the actors in this production carries off part of their assignments superbly.

Philip Riccio commands our attention immediately as the tormented young Konstantin, preparing an avant-garde play that everyone seems intent on ignoring. He’s frighteningly good, too, as the Oedpial manchild seeking comfort of many types from his mother.

But in the play’s final act, he alternates between stiff-upper-lip stoicism and bursts of hysteria, a combination that doesn’t achieve the desired effect.

The opposite trajectory occurs to Christine Horne’s Nina. At first she seems too strange, too quirky, too consciously odd to make us care much for her.

But as the evening progresses and tragedy takes hold of her life, she grows before our eyes and commands our empathy as well as our respect.

Yanna McIntosh can’t help but be effective as the hyper-theatrical Arkadina, looking gorgeous as she sweeps around the set and convincing us that her tiny little world is the only one worth inhabiting.

But on those occasions when things start falling apart and she realizes, for example, that her lover Trigorin has designs on the much younger Nina, it might be more effective if she let us see the cracks in the plaster more deeply.

Visually, the show has real sweep, and designer Julie Fox has given Abraham a series of bleakly open spaces to splash his actors across like paint on a canvas, a challenge he rises to well.

Kimberly Purtell’s lighting is largely effective, as always, but in the long final scene, the attempt to create mood by eliminating illumination is self-defeating. As these people tear themselves apart, we want to see the world collapsing in their eyes.

The inverse holds true for Thomas Ryder Payne’s soundscape, which has a lot of tremendously effective moments but overplays its hand in the final act. We know it’s winter and the wind is blowing. Don’t drown out the actors’ lines.

This is a production of The Seagull with flaws, to be sure, but none of them are fatal, and the many virtues the director and his cast bring to the table make it a show that deserves to be seen.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com